Humanity has ever been, "Show us the Father and it sufficeth us." And One has answered, "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." And the one who lay in the bosom of the manifested God has told us, God is not the unknowable-but "God is love. And he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God."

Philosophic Pantheism cannot satisfy the imperious cravings of the human soul. We must have a God, not a God coming to consciousness in the individual consciousness of man, but a God above and beyond man's grandest conceptions and loftiest ideas -a God absolute, eternal, self-existent. This God, as Herbert Spencer intimates, may be a God possessing higher attributes than those pertaining to our personality. But whatever else He may possess, He must have in His all-comprehending nature that which is highest and best in us. We cannot exalt Him by denying to Him that which, above all else, exalts, dignifies and glorifies man. We love. He loves. We will. He wills. We act. He acts. We are conscious of freedom. He must be beyond all necessity. Our act is intelligent. His cannot be that of a blind, insensate motion. Man works to an end. He does not work purposelessly. Man designs. God has shown in nature the working of a final cause.

Man must come into oneness with the Divine Being. But the union is not an absorption into the great sea of universal Being. The discreteness of the individual soul is forever preserved. The finite still remains the finite. But the will of the finite becomes coincident with the will of the Infinite. By his free, voluntary act man becomes at one with God. Without touching the special theological questions which here naturally arise, I may say that the view of a large number of the profoundest thinkers of the Christian Church help us to a clearer understanding of what may be considered pre-eminently as Christian Pantheism. "God comes forth," as Prof. Wm. T. Harris states, "by His self-determining activity, as the primordial self-determiner (pure activity), from a state of being selfdetermined (passive), and this coming forth or becoming is a process (which, so far as the Absolute is concerned, has been completed from Eternity), and gives us the Only and the eternally begotten Son, the Word, which was in the beginning, a

Word eternally spoken, but still a Word, the Word. And this becoming in another aspect is realized as a finite process, for the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God and Humanity, in the reality of that Humanity, are identified. The first Principle has eternally reflected itself in him, both self-active and self-object. The One eternally become' is thus the image of the Absolute and is Absolute."

Transcending our powers of comprehension, man, through his faith, the voluntary assent of his entire being, becomes one in purpose as he is one in his human nature with the eternally begotten and eternally becoming Son of God. He becomes now a partaker of the Divine Nature. It is not he that lives, but Christ that liveth in him. He is one with Christ in the measureless, fathomless meaning of that oneness, even as Christ is one with the Father.

This is Christian Pantheism. In the beginning, God. In the working of all things, God. In the end, God.

IMMORTALITY IN THE OLD TESTAMENT SCRIP

TURES.

[Delivered before the Institute, March 3d, 1890.]

BY CHARLES D. W. BRIDGMAN, D.D., NEW YORK.

IT

T is a strange fact that the human mind has persistently clung to the idea of a future life in spite of the things which tend to discredit it. Amongst the rudest of peoples the hope has been cherished that "life shall live for evermore"; and in the realm of philosophy, though men may confess that they are unable to find any scientific basis for the doctrine of a future existence, they yet feel constrained to admit the possibility of its truth. Whilst they doubt, there is an instinct of nature which disposes them to believe. In a world full of graves, and where the story of each generation is epitomized in an epitaph, men dream of themselves as immortal! Even in the charnel-house of materialism the hope lives as a flickering flame. The doctrine of a future existence is, practically, universal.

And there are several things which pre-dispose the soul to such a belief. Men cling to existence. Their first and strongest desire is to be, and it is not enough to be now; they want to be always. In their highest and best modes men realize that life has a charm of its own. The poet and orator do not ask that they may sing and speak for to-day; they want their strains to flow on, giving comfort and strength to man's heart, and sending an ever fresh impulse into the life of humanity. Artist, artisan, inventor-everyone feels the delight of existence and longs to enjoy it forever. Even rude life feels there would be blessedness in a simply perpetuated existence. The Indian dreams of his hunting-ground only made ampler, and glows at the thought of it. The Northmen look forward to an eternity in the fellowship of the brave. His hope of immortality is the expression of man's love of life.

It is also connected with love. How much of our sharpest, our worst troubles, come through our loves, through the long

partings our hearts must endure, the wasting anxieties, the frustrated longings, the constant menace of pitiless, inescapable death? It is hope that makes the love blessed-the hope of a future; and were man without this, his love would be the bitterest ingredient in the cup of his misery. Love has but one symbol in its language, and that is, forever. At the end of its meditations you find this one sentence: "There is no death.” And this belief is still further supported by the fact of the incompleteness of life. The wings of the bird imply a freer life than that in the cage; the leaves folded up in the bud are significant of the longer, sunnier days which shall follow the winter; and the power that is repressed in us, the faculty which cannot be fully unfolded under existing conditions, seems to intimate a released, larger life in the future. Baring-Gould tells us he was talking with a village mechanic, when a few chords were struck on a piano in an adjoining room; the man stopped and listened, and then said in a shaking voice, "I cannot help it; music makes me cry." There was the soul of a musician, perhaps of a genius, enduring the hardships of a lot which allowed it no room to grow and expand into flower. So under their sense of restraint, so with their consciousness of powers which are not allowed to come forth in full exercise, a strong sense of expectancy is developed which makes immortality credible. "My whole nature," said Fichte, "rushes on with irresistible force towards a future and a better state of being"; and he uttered what myriads have felt amid the limitations and disappointments of life.

Now, it would be utterly inexplicable if these voices were not heard in the Old Testament; if we could not find running through it, inspiring and sustaining its heroes and saints, this belief and this hope. If we look for it as a doctrine plainly set forth, like that of God's unity or God's sovereignty, it will not be found. The immortality of the soul is not explicitly taught in the Old Testament Scriptures. Even Dr. Hodge says that "They take the continued existence of the soul for granted rather than explicitly assert it"; whilst Canon Farrar says, "It is indisputable that the earlier books of the Bible contain no clear revelation upon the subject of man's immortality." Still the belief is inti

mated in one form or another all through the Old Testament. It is implied in the following passages: "And Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him;"" Elijah went up by a whirlwind into Heaven;" "My flesh shall dwell in safety, for Thou wilt not leave my soul in hades, Thou wilt not suffer Thy beloved to see the pit;" "Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it;""Thou wilt guide me in Thy counsel, and afterwards wilt take me to glory." It was not a plainly declared doctrine, but a hope, a belief, a conviction; it was stronger in the Jews than in the nations about them, more closely connected with holiness and with God, and it grew more intense and controlling after the Babylonian captivity, because of their sorrows and the glimpses which were given their prophets of the dim future of souls. They, too, loved life; they, too, felt those longings of love which make endless separation impossible; they, too, must have had that sense of grim, incongruous irony which smites us when we think of the seemingly boundless possibilities of affection and reason and virtue being smitten and extinguished for

ever.

There is one passage, however, which attracts us more strongly than any one we have given, and in which this hope is put forth into its purest expression. "I know," says Job, "that my Redeemer liveth, and He will stand at last over my dust; yea, after my skin, when my body hath thus been destroyed, without my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see on my side, and mine eyes shall behold, not those of another "-words which are attributed by scholars to the age of Solomon and, therefore, not to be taken as expressive of the less positive, less perfect belief of the patriarchs. The passage is memorable as uttering the hope of a man whose life seemed to have failed, whose possessions had been snatched away, whose integrity was dishonored, but who, stripped and condemned by his friends, still comforted himself with thoughts of the vindication of God. His hope comes forth in this verse into a living, confident faith. It was simply impossible for him to believe that God was really opposed to him, though He seemed to be hostile, or that He never would conclusively vindicate his character. And as he